Hello, Gusser! That large room still has me wondering-- here's why:
(1) We ran, in past years-- in our old smaller demo room-- about 1 to 3 o'clock on our attenuator.
(2) In the larger room, we had to run it-- with the exact same speakers, amps, and input levels to the attenuator-- at 10-11 o'clock.
(3) In the old room, we peaked out at about 8/10 watt per side, in the new room, it is about 1/3 watt per side-- or less. That's all the room will permit-- as it is.
(3) If you're thinking "they had power to burn, then what went askew?", you would be on my own wavelength.
Oh, I have plenty of theories on this-- here's one that is possible: The old smaller room is much more absorptive, and allowed the use of more power (true), and the new, much larger room MIGHT have room gain-- quite a lot? (That's only speculative at this point, Gusser-- the fact is, I don't yet know that).
I do know that we could not run as much power in there as we could with the smaller room. Crank 'er up in the large room, and you will really excite that room, and it will throw things back at you. Those would be side-wall kickbacks and reflections, and possibly ceiling-bounce, and maybe even the room's volume, size, and shape allow a sort of internal amplification.
Now, all of this is just theories so far. The room DID NOT display any easy-to-spot echoes, and the back wall seemed pretty substantial-- that is, it did not tend to "ring" when speakers were close to it-- so it must have been of fairly good construction.
I had brought along some Pendleton Indian-Style blankets of differing sizes, but alas, people were coming in, and that was the end of the setup time we had.
I know that my use of a wide video panel caused the speakers to be too widely separated for this room, despite its large size. Interestingly, these speakers have performed very well in homes with even larger rooms, but they were not as "square" as this one was.
The room is about 26 feet X 25.5 feet, and has some cavities, alcoves, and etc., which do not make it a true square.
The room didn't have a "Hall-Effect", and it didn't really ring, but you could not use any power in there without getting VERY loud-- in the entire room!
If that was done, clarity was good, as was dynamics, but the side walls really got excited, and the entire room sort of "lit up".
Late on Sunday, I finally got time to do some tire-kicking, and what I kicked around was the speakers. I finally got a smaller area inside the giant room-- performing fairly well. One guy said we had finally gotten the better sound at the show, but that he didn't consider that a compliment.
He said we were "too late" (Sunday evening), and that we hadn't come up-- even then, to what he normally expects from us-- judging from past shows.
He was right. Gusser, if you or others here have some ideas on how to use large Hotel rooms for audio-- I'm all ears-- maybe I can learn something here... those large rooms bring in people, smaller rooms don't--people shoot right ny them. Nevertheless, I'll go back to smaller if I can't fix the monsters. Jim Smith "Get Better Sound" book-- mentions in his book that large rooms don't cut it, yet I have speakers in large rooms IN HOMES that really work.
Oh yeah-- the video! THAT was fun! On Sat. night, we invited people in, and no one left until the DVDs were finished. One guy said, "this is by far the most fun I ever had at an audio show".
Don't blame the room for the audio-- just yet-- blame me!
---Dennis---
